When Herminia Pasantes Ordóñez was about 14 years previous, in 1950, she heard her mom inform her father that she would by no means discover a husband. Pasantes needed to put on thick glasses for her poor eyesight. In her mom’s eyes, these glasses meant her future as a “good woman” was doomed. “This made my life easier,” says Pasantes, “because it was already said that I was going to study.”
At a time when it was unusual for girls to turn out to be scientists, Pasantes studied biology on the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, or UNAM. She was the primary member of her household to go to varsity.
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She turned a neurobiologist and one of the vital essential Mexican scientists of her time. Her research on the position of the chemical taurine within the mind supply deep insights into how cells keep their measurement — important to correct functioning. In 2001, she turned the primary lady to earn Mexico’s National Prize for Sciences and Arts within the space of bodily, mathematical and pure sciences.
“We basically learned about cell volume regulation through the eyes and work of Herminia,” says Alexander Mongin, a Belarusian neuroscientist at Albany Medical College in New York.
Pasantes did get married, in 1965 whereas doing her grasp’s in biochemistry at UNAM. She had a daughter in 1966 and a son in 1967 earlier than beginning a Ph.D. in pure sciences in 1970 on the Center for Neurochemistry on the University of Strasbourg in France. There, she labored within the laboratory of Paul Mandel, a Polish pioneer in neurochemistry.
The lab was looking for out every little thing there was to know concerning the retina, the layer of tissue in the back of the attention that’s delicate to gentle. Pasantes determined to check whether or not free amino acids, a bunch that aren’t integrated into proteins, had been current within the retinas and mind of mice. Her first chromatography — a lab method that lets scientists separate and determine the elements of a pattern — confirmed an immense quantity of taurine in each tissues. Taurine would drive the remainder of her scientific profession, together with work in her personal lab, which she began round 1975 on the Institute of Cellular Physiology at UNAM.
Taurine seems to be broadly distributed in animal tissues and has various organic features, a few of which had been found by Pasantes. Her analysis discovered that taurine helps keep cell quantity in nerve cells, and that it protects mind, muscle, coronary heart and retinal cells by stopping the loss of life of stem cells, which give rise to all specialised cells within the physique.
Contrary to what most scientists had believed on the time, taurine didn’t work as a neurotransmitter sending messages between nerve cells. Pasantes demonstrated for the primary time that it labored as an osmolyte within the mind. Osmolytes assist keep the dimensions and integrity of cells by opening up channels of their membranes to get water in or out.
Pasantes says she spent a few years in search of a solution for why there’s a lot taurine within the mind. “When you ask nature a question, 80 to 90 percent of the time, it responds no,” she says. “But when it answers yes, it’s wonderful.”
Pasantes’ lab was one of many huge 4 labs that did groundbreaking work on cell quantity regulation within the mind, says Mongin.
Her work and that of others proved taurine has a protecting impact; it’s the explanation the chemical is in the present day sprinkled within the containers that carry organs for transplants. Pasantes’ work was the muse for our understanding of the right way to stop and deal with mind edema, a situation the place the mind swells on account of extreme accumulation of fluid, from head trauma or diminished blood provide, for instance. She and different consultants additionally reviewed the position of taurine for Red Bull, which added the chemical to its system due to probably protecting results within the coronary heart.
Pasantes stopped doing analysis in 2019 and spends her time speaking and writing about science. She hopes her story speaks to girls all over the world who want to be scientists: “It is important to send the message that it is possible,” she says.
Years earlier than she was accepted into Mandel’s lab, her utility to a Ph.D. in biochemistry on the UNAM was rejected. Pasantes says the explanation was that she had simply had her daughter. Looking again, this second was “one of the most wonderful things that could’ve happened to me,” Pasantes says, as a result of she ended up in Strasbourg, the place her potential as a researcher bloomed.
Rosa María González Victoria, a social scientist on the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo in Pachuca, Mexico, who focuses on gender research, not too long ago interviewed Pasantes for a ebook about Mexican girls in science. González Victoria thinks Pasantes’ response to that early rejection speaks to the type of particular person she is: “A woman that takes those no’s and turns them into yes’s.”